The Intelligent Self Interest of Frogs

There's an old story about cooking a frog. If you put the frog in the water and heat it to boiling, the frog will placidly die. But if you drop the frog into boiling water, the frog will immediately jump out. I have no idea if this story is true or not or if that's even the best way to cook frogs or why one would want to cook a frog in the first place. But the metaphor is still valid: gradual changes are more difficult for humans to perceive than immediate changes. And, I submit, harder for humans to even acknowledge.

This is especially true in climate changes. Most of the world has decided that, oh, thirty years of science is probably correct. (See here and here, for example.) Recent events have put some interesting wrinkles into the whole process. For example, one of the impending problems of global warming is the raising of sea level as the world glaciers melt. The December Scientific American and the work from the NASA Earth Observatory program have pointed out the glaciers don't have to melt to cause the problem. If you take a glass of water and measure the water level in it, then drop an ice cube in the water, the water level rises. If you then mark the new water level and wait for the ice to melt, the risen water level remains the same. The ice displaces the same amount of water whether it's melted or not.

Similarly, if glaciers roll down hill into the water without melting, they raise the sea level the same as if they melted into water. The difference is that it takes an enormous amount of heat to melt the glacier and considerably less to get it sliding. Turns out that one of the brakes on glacier movement is the ice shelf in the ocean that the glacier piles into. All across the world, the ice shelves are breaking loose resulting in glaciers on the move. How this changes the model of global warming and the timing of sea level rise isn't clear. (What's the effect of cooling the ocean with a few billion cubic feet of ice?) But the Greenland glaciers and the East Antarctic Glaciers comprise together about 50 feet of sea level rise. The West Antarctic Glaciers comprise about 170 of sea level rise. (December Sciam article, here.)

My friend Erik makes the point that there have been previous, and potentially warmer) global warming events. This one is different in that we have control of the source but the others were not of human origin. Consequently, if we live on this planet long enough, we will have to deal with managing a global warming event. That means figuring out a way of sequestering the CO2 (or methane) that is in the atmosphere. He views the global warming we're causing as perhaps a good thing. We're not going to stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere. Therefore, when we finally become a boiling frog, we're going to have to get it out of the air somehow. I think he's overly optimistic but he does have a point.

There have been a lot of CO2 sequestration solutions put on the table in the last couple of years. Most of them involving pushing the CO2 into a new spot such as empty oil fields or other places or enhancing the uptake of CO2 by plants, such as forests or plankton. One interesting article suggested the "greenness" of ethanol, even in switchgrass plantations, might be suspect since it may involve the destruction of forests. Leveling a forest that takes up a few million tons of CO2 to create a plantation that takes up only a few hundred thousand tons of CO2 could be considered a bad deal.

A couple of bright notes have showed up, however. The big terrestrial CO2 uptake systems are equatorial since growth can happen all year long. Temperate forests are net CO2 sinks in the summer but when the forests go dormant they become net CO2 sources. Another NASA Earth Observatory article notes that one CO2 effect is to push off fall. This has the result of longer uptake of CO2 by temperate forests.

Another interesting idea is coming from outside climatology and instead comes from the continuing question of how to date sedimentary rocks. This article again comes from the NASA Earth Observatory. At issue is the rate of Calcium Carbonate crystallization. CaCO3 is a stable form of Carbon. In fact, it is stable enough that fossil CaCO3 is found all the time in the form of marine organism shells and is the most abundant single mineral on earth. Scientists studying the mineral in Yellowstone found that CaCO3 crystallization occurred twice as fast in the presence of microbes.

Now, to my thinking, this is a vastly superior method of sequestering carbon than pumping millions of gallons of carbonated water into used up oil fields. It does push off the problem (so do other methods) in that over geologic time carbon that is carried into the earth comes out again. But, as Erik said, we are going to have to deal with that eventually.

Go thou, scientists. Industrialize those microbes.

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Note from last post. My wife read about my two readers and asked who my other one was.
*sigh* I get no respect.